Korrlok Week: Gothic
by spockandawe
Summary: After Amon kidnapped the Avatar, and after Tarrlok's family connections were revealed, he resigned from the city council and led an isolated, reclusive life in his own home.


With a prompt like 'Gothic,' I was having trouble thinking of how to write it, not just draw it. I settled on retelling one of my favorite gothic short stories by Faulkner. Now, to write this, I drew VERY, very heavily on the original text. It's not an exact copy, but it sure wouldn't pass a plagarism test. As much as I would love to learn to imitate his style without directly copying lines and phrases, I don't have the time for that right now, especially in trying to directly parallel one of his stories.

* * *

When Councilman Tarrlok died, half the city went to his funeral. There was respect, certainly, for a fallen monument, but also a great curiosity to see the inside of his house, which no one but an old servant had seen in at least ten years.

It was a large house that had once been white, decorated with spires and scrollwork and set on what had once been the a very select street. But shops and factories had encroached and driven away the other residents of that neighborhood, until only Councilman Tarrlok's house was left, stubbornly standing among the rusting Satomobiles and grey smokestacks- an eyesore among eyesores. And now Councilman Tarrlok had gone to join the residents of those old houses where they lay in anonymous urns, among forgotten generals and nobles of the old world.

Alive, Councilman Tarrlok had been a duty and a care, an obligation upon the town dating from that day when he stepped down from his official duties, and the remaining members of the council voted unanimously to provide him a pension from that day on into perpetuity. Not that Councilman Tarrlok would have accepted charity. The council invented some tale to the effect that Councilman Tarrlok had never been fully paid for his services to the city in his fight again Amon and his Equalists. He was willing to believe them.

This was a month after the Avatar had disappeared, and a short time after Amon had been defeated. After he discovered his relationship with Amon, he went out very little; after his brother was killed, people hardly saw him at all. Several people had the temerity to call, but were not received. The only sign of life about the place was the servant- a young man then- going in and out with a market basket.

Considering all that had happened to him, it was no great surprise when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Councilman.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the chief of police.

"But what will you have me do about it?" she said.

"Why send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?"

"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Chief Beifong said. "It's probably a dead animal in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."

After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for him. People had resented the way he'd held himself too high for what he was, an unknown from the North Pole, raised to prominence on the city council. None of the young women were quite good enough for Councilman Tarrlok and such.

When word reached us of who his father had been, who his brother was, we were not pleased exactly, but it went some way to explain his behavior. When he left the Council and quietly began to sell off the land around his house, people were glad. At last we could pity him. Being left alone and a pauper, he had become humanized.

One of the few times he went out instead of sending the servant was when he bought the rat poison, the arsenic. "I want some poison," he said to the druggist. He looked older than his years, almost too thin, with cold, haughty blue eyes in a face the skin of which was strained across the temples. "I want some poison," he said.

"Yes, Councilman Tarrlok. What kind? For spider rats and such? I'd recom-"

"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."

The druggist named several. "But what you want is-"

"Arsenic," Councilman Tarrlok said. Is that a good one?"

"Is... arsenic? Yes, sir. But what you want-"

"I want arsenic."

The druggist looked up at him. He looked back, erect with his shoulders pulled stiffly back. "Why of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell me what you are going to use it for."

Councilman Tarrlok just stared at him, unmoving, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. When he opened the package at home, there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For spider rats."

So the next day we all said, "He will kill himself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When he had first begun to be seen with the new Avatar, we had said, "She will make his fortune." Then we said, "He will persuade her yet," because she had spoken loudly and often about how she thought the city ought to be governed. They clashed frequently over the problem of Amon and his revolution. It seemed almost certain that she would bring it to blows or he would have her arrested.

Then Amon stepped in, and that was the last we saw of Avatar Korra. It was no surprise that Councilman Tarrlok was so affected. He rallied to assist with the search for Amon and the Avatar. When he realized his own brother was behind the mask and the word spread about his family history, he immediately resigned his council post and retired to his home.

After he purchased the arsenic, we kept an anxious watch on his home. The servant went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see him at the window for a moment, but for almost six months he did not appear on the streets.

When we next saw Councilman Tarrlok, his hair was turning grey. During the next few years it grew greyer and greyer until it attained an even dusty brown-grey, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of his death at seventy-four, it was still that vigorous grey, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on his front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when he was about fifty, during which he gave lessons in waterbending. The children and grandchildren of his old acquaintances were sent to him once a week to learn the old traditional Northern forms. The newer generation did not send their children to him. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. Thus he passed from generation to generation.

And so he died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering old servant to wait on him. We did not even know he was sick, we had long since given up trying to get any information from the servant. He talked to no one, probably not even to his mater, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

He died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, his grey head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

The servant met the first of the men at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

The funeral was held on the second day, the city coming to look at Councilman Tarrlok beneath a mass of bought flowers, the very old women talking of him as if he had been a contemporary of theirs, believing they had danced with him and perhaps been courted by him, confusing time with its mathematical progression.

Already we knew there were there were rooms above the stairs which no one had seen in forty years and which would have to be opened. We waited until Councilman Tarrlok was decently in the ground before we opened it.

The room seemed to be filled with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as well as money had once been able to purchase: upon the valance curtains of faded blue, the blue-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate arrays of crystal. On the table lay the carved hair ties, yellowed with age, which, lifted, left opon the surface pale lines in the dust. Upon a chair hung the coat, carefully folded; beneath it lay the two mute boots.

The woman herself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded her. What was left of her, rotten beneath what was left of her clothing, had become inextricable from the bed in which she lay; and upon her and upon the pillow beside her lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of grey hair.

* * *

The original story is A Rose For Emily, and I strongly recommend it.


End file.
